Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who has been called “snake oil peddler,” “smug,” “arrogant,” “intolerant,” “arrogant” and a “doofus” by the Inquirer in times past, penned his first bi-monthly column for the Inky today. He spends the rest of the week combating “Islamofascism” at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

In his kick-off piece, hard-right Santorum notes that he gets little love in the City of Brotherly Love, which gave him 20 percent of its votes in his big loss to Democrat Bob Casey in `06.

Santorum has lifted himself off the mat, vowing to be more than just a “token voice of the great unwashed.” He wants to speak for the “thousands of people who either read this section of the paper only as a source of enemy intel or don’t read it because it is bad for their blood pressure.”

Santorum calls the “conservative movement” rudderless, and he hopes to restore America’s confidence in it.

Once considered one of the most polarizing figures in the Senate, Santorum now is singing a different tune. “Some have so personalized their contempt for the opposing view that they can no longer view issues with any sense of inquiry or objectivity.”

It’s unfortunate, to Santorum, that the “institutional left—Hollywood, mainstream media and academia—have not only become intolerant of dissent from their own orthodoxies but also often attack anyone who espouses an opposing view.”